by Phil Soran, President, Dell Compellent — February 22, 2011

To our customers, partners, shareholders and employees:

Today, Dell announced  that it has successfully completed its acquisition of Compellent. Before I go any further, let me just pause to say thank you.

We didn’t become the world’s fastest growing SAN company by ourselves. We got a lot of help from our loyal customers, partners, employees and shareholders. I believe this acquisition validates the trust you placed in our business and our technology. The opportunity in front of us wouldn’t be here without your passion and hard work.

As for the opportunity ahead, our shareholders approved the merger because they recognized the synergies between Compellent and Dell. For both, our roots are entrepreneurial and our cultures are similar, we have a shared vision for the future of IT – and we’ve separately engineered innovative technologies in line with our vision. From today on, our two companies will work as one to make that vision a reality for enterprises around the world.

As we celebrate this milestone in both companies’ successful histories, I’d like to offer a few thoughts about the days ahead:

What This Means to Our Employees

Nine years ago today three guys got together in the basement. And I want to acknowledge my partners, John Guider and Larry Aszmann. Guys, take a bow. In 2002, when we started this company, we had a vision: to create a company that would innovate and improve on the existing state of storage – to create fluid technology that encouraged customers to purchase fewer, not more, drives; to provide excellent service and support; and to be a true and honest partner to the channel and to our customers.

I’m very proud of the achievements of our employees – how we created something worth almost a billion dollars in value. Let me give some examples of the great work done by our team over the years:

• Delivered $414.9 million in total revenue from 2004 to 2010
• Supported a total of 1,300 dependents and employees
• Teamed with 522 channel partners
• Processed 23,506 sales orders, and
• Shipped 7,000 controllers in 4,100 systems to 2600 customers

Not many companies can say they did that. Together, this team started a business, raised money, built a product, found channel partners, and turned it all into something much bigger than the sum of its pieces and parts – bigger than all of us. And together we will help Dell redefine the data center.

 

What This Means to Our Customers

First and foremost, I want to emphasize that our world-class customer experience will not change. I recognize that for many of our valued customers, Copilot is their favorite Compellent feature and our customers can continue to count on that personalized level of service excellence you have come to know and love from our great Copilot team.

Dell is committed to adding more resources to support our customers, and more resources to keep innovating our product. Together with Dell, we can accelerate new features, new integration, and scale deeper into the data center to help customers turn IT from a cost center to a flexible business productivity center.  I thank you for your support and it’s very gratifying to see such great enthusiasm for joining the Dell family.

 

What This Means to Our Channel Partners

You’ve heard me say that the channel is in our DNA. Our goal with Dell is to protect and grow Compellent’s channel relationships.  Dell announced a long-term registration program for all Dell PartnerDirect channel partners that are certified to sell storage, helping partners grow and nurture their customer relationships as trusted IT advisors once they have sold a Dell storage solution.

All current Compellent partners will be “grandfathered” into the Dell Certified Partner Program as Storage Certified Partners, which offers many benefits, including access to a diverse portfolio of products, healthy margins and list-price discounts. More information about these benefits can be found on the Dell PartnerDirect site.

 

The New Dell Storage Forum 2011

We have joined forces to launch a combined storage conference to help partners and customers get the most from their product investment and ongoing relationship with us.  Our first ever Dell Storage Forum will take place June 5-11, 2010 in Orlando, Florida at the Walt Disney Resort.  This is where storage magic will happen.  The new conference will take all of the things you love about C-Drive and grow it into a bigger event. It’s also the first time Dell will dedicate a track just for channel partners.

Scott Horst’s blog explains why it made sense for us to combine C-Drive with the EqualLogic user conference, two very successful events, into one for the entire Dell storage community. We will also look at hosting Europe and Asia events throughout the year – so stay tuned for updates.

Thanks to your vision, loyalty and support, we have created a community that is passionate about innovative storage technology. Innovation is core to Compellent and our award-winning product. We know we have something very special in Compellent. And Dell recognizes it too.

Thank you.

Phil

by Phil Soran, President, Dell Compellent — February 22, 2010

When we founded this company more than seven years ago, the world was going through a series of profound changes, not unlike what we are experiencing today: a digital data explosion, economic turbulence, natural disasters and more. At the same time, companies were frustrated with the rigid boundaries of their existing storage: dead-end growth paths, limited point products, wasted capacity, system complexity and skyrocketing costs. IT felt stuck in the system’s same old storage system.

As a result, we saw an opportunity to shake up the status quo and produce a solution built around what customers truly wanted. From this simple revelation came the incredible revolution we now call Fluid Data. Fluid Data has been at the core of Compellent since day one. It has allowed us to take on the industry giants with great ideas, revolutionary products and a fresh way of doing business. With the unwavering commitment of our customers, partners and employees, we’ve become the world’s fastest growing storage company, and we’ll take another big step forward.

We see an opportunity to start a new conversation about data. Whereas other systems treat data as a static thing, we believe data should be actively, intelligently managed and moved throughout a business wherever and whenever it’s needed. We’re out to boldly tell the world an essential truth about data, and that truth is that data needs to be fluid.

To help you learn and share the Fluid Data story, we’ve launched a new Web site and other materials that help define what’s fluid, and what’s not. We hope you’ll agree that the Future is Fluid.

As always, the Compellent team and I thank you for your support.

Phil Soran, President and CEO

Editor’s note: This post is adapted from a letter CEO Phil Soran sent to employees, customers and partners announcing our new Web site and the conversation we’re having on “Fluid Data.”

by Phil Soran, President, Dell Compellent — July 30, 2008

Six years ago, Larry Aszmann, John Guider and I launched Compellent to bring our vision of the next-generation of enterprise storage to the market. Today, we’re announcing and celebrating another milestone in our business—we’ve signed our 1,000th customer, IMG, the global sports, entertainment and media company.

We’re incredibly proud that IMG is the newest customer to join our growing global community. IMG will steer its worldwide virtual data center based on Compellent, Microsoft and VMware from its London site. Like IMG, other customers throughout the world have recently turned to us instead of larger competitors, including BLGG, Van Ameyde Group and Zeeman textielSupers in The Netherlands; and Calyon, Harsch GmbH, and IAV GmbH in Germany.

In the U.S., General Information Services and the Orlando Magic are using Compellent virtualized storage as the foundation for their mission-critical applications. For example, GIS, our SAN supports the tools that generate background checks and reports for clients like the U.S. Postal Service and McDonald’s. The Orlando Magic will be making a run for the NBA championship in a new all-digital arena, with information stored on the SAN.

A vital part of our community is our employees. Reaching 1,000 customers just four years after we shipped our first product has been possible because our entire organization is executing and firing on all cylinders. Larry, John and I extend our thanks to our team members for their dedication and commitment to excellence—the company’s success is due to their positively aggressive approach to delivering the world’s most powerful, easy to use SAN.

The loyalty demonstrated by our customer base and channel partners is something that we continually strive to keep. In 2004, I remember helping to deliver a Storage Center SAN to what would become our first customer, The Ohio State University Fisher College of Business. Today the OSU business school continues to increase SAN capacity to keep up with data growth that’s doubling every two years, and plans to add a host of new, innovative projects to its data center including server virtualization and thin replication. Fisher’s Compellent experience exemplifies our founding goal to design a scalable and modular SAN that allows organizations to build upon their existing investments both affordably and painlessly.

From the start, our end-users have trusted our channel partners as their storage technology advisors. We thank all of our partners for their support, commitment to customer service and expertise. Today our 100% channel network includes partners in 32 countries on five continents and the numbers are growing. Our partners tell us they are enjoying excellent margins, repeat revenue opportunities and the best field support in pre- and post-sale opportunities in their business. Some partners, like the Davenport Group, Winslow Technologies, Convergent and Clear North, have standardized their SAN offerings on Compellent, and have been part of the Compellent community since day one.

Together with our community, we look forward to working to surpass our next big milestones—whether it’s our 2,000th or 20,000th customer.